sand on his lips, salt in his eyes
by o-seastarved
Summary: When he rolled onto the ground in the wake of the cart he was met with a mouthful of something grainy and dry. He spit it out. Not dirt. Bellamy ripped off the scrap of sullied cloth that covered his eyes and found himself, on hands and knees, in the middle of a an endless yellow death knell. The dead zone.


Um so this is for gracefullyclumsy who literally tweeted me: _"honestly you could write a fic of bellamy eating grass and i would read it."_ So I did. Because I'm a monster. Anyway, here's your Christmas present, Soph:

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><p>xxx<p>

The wooden cart smelled like death. Its air, locked in from the heavy canvas over it, was putrid and stagnant. Rickety too, which Bellamy was using to his advantage, letting the rope that bound his hands rub against a sharp nail for what seemed like days. The turbulence soon became rhythmic, and he nodded along to the thumping of the wheels and sloshing of the cart, letting it lull him into a sort of fitful sleep until he felt a snap and a stinging pain as the nail sliced through his wrist. And he pushed himself off.

When he rolled onto the ground in the wake of the cart he was met with a mouthful of something grainy and dry. He spit it out. Not dirt. Bellamy ripped off the scrap of sullied cloth that covered his eyes and found himself, on hands and knees, in the middle of a an endless yellow death knell.

The dead zone.

xxx

Banished, the council had ruled. Camp Jaha had come down hard on The 100 and their insubordinate tendencies which included but were not limited to: sneaking out, theft of firearms, tampering with security and equipment, repeated calls of dissent, and outright non compliance. The council was out of their league down here on earth. They knew it. The kids knew it. Everyone knew it. But they couldn't very well deign to teenagers to lead them, so the answer was to disband them. But Clarke was untouchable because of Abby, and Raven was the most valuable person camp Jaha had besides Abby. The answer for the council: Bellamy.

When they handed him over to the Grounder caravan headed for the desert Lincoln had to hold Octavia back, his strong arms barely holding on to her as she thrashed, her voice cracking with screams to her brother. Bellamy swallowed hard and looked behind him, nodding curtly to Lincoln and only lingering on the scene long enough for Lincoln to return the gesture.

Bellamy looked to the sky and inhaled the damp air of the forrest he had grown to love, for all of its haunts and all of its dangers and all of its scents and textures and depth. _May we meet again_ he thought, before a rough hand yanked at his shoulder.

"Hey princess, didn't think you'd show," he said, though it came out as a gravelly whisper.

Clarke's eyes were wide and glassy, the way they got when she was serious. And granted, she was always serious, but he had grown to recognize the millimeters of difference in her face. He knew them all.

"You listen to me," she said, low and grave. "Listen."

He held her gaze. Nodded ever so slightly.

"Find a way. Survive. And you find a way. Do you understand?" He thought maybe Clarke's lip quivered, just a millimeter, before the guards pushed him forward and through the gates.

xxx

The sun was hot on his skin, so hot that it burned. His lips were chapped and broken, the creases in his hands stiff and rough, like bark. He'd been walking for two days, waking when the sun rose to point his feet in its direction and walked, even as the sun moved circles around him.

How much longer? How much longer with no sign of life, no sign of anything but sand. His tongue was swollen and heavy in his mouth and the thought of water only surfaced a desperation in his gut that was too dangerous to let brim. _No. Think of something else. Anything. _

He thought of Octavia in incoherent flashes. Turning the page of the book he was reading to her only to find her long asleep against his chest. A kiss on the top of her head. Her smile. Her laugh that would bounce off of the walls of her eight by eight foot world. The way she bloomed on earth. Breathed the air full in her lungs and exhaled fifteen years of confinement into the atmosphere.

Octavia and the thought of flowers in her hair kept his feet moving one in front of the other but tiny spheres of water would drip drip drop onto the image he'd paint for himself and threaten to capsize everything. Soon it became a constant stream, the gleaming crisp cool refreshing thirst quenching water. It poured all over his eyes and washed Octavia away until it brought him to his knees.

If he had tears to shed he would have. Instead, eyes shut tight and fists punching the shifting ground, Bellamy screamed. It tore through his throat and cracked and burned, but he yelled into the abyss until there was nothing left and all that came out was the slight whistle his voice box made as it puffed hot air into the hotter void.

He let his head fall, forehead to ground, and his muscles collapse on themselves. He was going to die there. Right there. Not two feet to the left of there because he couldn't fucking get up. Right here in this spot.

Minutes, hours, days, weeks passed by him, or so he thought. And still he lay there, waiting to die. But he wasn't. He couldn't. _Find a way._ He licked his lips and came back with sand in his mouth, He fought to open his eyes, the sun's glare distorting his vision into circles and flares.

"Find a way," he heard again only this time he didn't hear it in his head, but outside of it.

Bellamy squinted, one ear to the ground and the other arm flexing to try and lift himself up off the ground. And that's when he saw it. Some sort of form, like a person. A person with wild yellow hair and a face, soft and round like an angel's.

"Clarke?" he whispered. Cracked. Hollow.

"Isn't that what I told you?" She said.

"How are you here right now?"

"I followed you," she said. The edges of her words were more rounded and soft than usual. The way she spoke was warm and comforting and fluid.

A surge of panic rose through him, the most energy he'd felt in days. It thrust through him and jolted him up so that his torso was off the ground, and he hoisted himself upright with his forearms to face her. "You shouldn't have done that, Clarke. That was so stupid. Why would you-"

Her finger pressed against his lips to hush him. "Shhh," she reassured. "You didn't think I'd leave you behind did you?"

Bellamy searched her face for the millimeters of difference he had mapped. His brow furrowed and sweat pricked his eyes. He didn't understand. He couldn't understand, and the millimeters weren't telling him, so he clutched her forearm with his cracked and bloody hand and held on. "You should. Go. Leave me and go." His voice wavered, but for the first time in days (weeks, months?) it was deep and commanding and determined.

Clarke's lips pushed against each other and her eyes were round, the way they got when she was flooded with emotion for someone else. Her free hand snaked around his ear, fingers in his hair at the nape of his neck and the pad of her thumb running coarsely along the stubble at his jaw. Her eyes were swallowing him whole.

"I don't know how to keep going," he said and collapsed into her. His forehead buried in her knees and aimless hands groped at the sides of her thighs, her ankles. And he wept. All that he could. "Tell me how. I don't know how," he choked, muffled into her skin.

Her cool hands roamed his back, his hair. "You just survive, Bell. It's just surviving."

She let him stay there and rest until he was ready. When Bellamy rose his eyes were raw and red. Clarke smiled her close-lipped smile at him that he knew so well. "We always survive. That's who we are." She punctuated the last words the way he remembered she once had.

His lips pulled tight and his eyes crinkled as he nodded at her through salty, stinging tears that caught on her hands as they rolled down his face.

"You're not going to die here, Bellamy. Alone, without your people. Without Octavia. Without me."

Bellamy tensed. "What do you mean, you?" But Clarke cut him off when she brushed her soft lips against his, parched and broken as they were. It was a soft and feather light kiss, and when he blinked and pulled back to look at her she was gone.

He touched fingers to lips and looked around him only to find stretches of desert, his own personal hell, for miles in every direction. And there he was, Bellamy Blake, sitting dumbfounded in the middle of it.

xxx

One foot after another. East. You just do it. Find a way.

Another day and night Bellamy walked, and he knew he shouldn't be alive. When his shoes shredded and his scalp burned he used his shirt to wrap his feet and head, but even they were falling apart by now. He could no longer keep his head up, so it lolled down against his chest and his eyesight was clouded and grey. But his feet kept moving. One in front of the other. East.

He was broken out of his trance when he felt something cold and slimy against his toes. He willed his eyes to focus, but he couldn't make them. He inhaled sharply and halted. He smelled something fresh, herbal. Damp air filled his lungs.

Grass.

Bellamy fell to his hands and knees and felt it beneath him. Soft, dewey, like heaven. He wiped at his crusted eyes and willed them to focus on the blades inches from his nose. And there it was. The greenest green he had ever seen. He'd made it. Made it back to the edge of the forrest where everything smelled like mud and pine and grass and eucalyptus and dirt. Sweet sweet dirt.

And then, without thinking, he buried his fists into the ground and twisted them around the blades and pulled. Clumps of wet grass were the closest he'd come to sustenance for days, and he shoved them into his mouth hungrily, cherishing the dew drops that met his tongue and the moisture he could unlock from chewing the wide, flat blades.

He ate until his empty stomach lurched and he wretched it all out, back to the earth where it belonged. He'd never felt so elated and so low all at once. And so he waited for his breathing to calm and soon the noises of the woods returned to pique his eardrums when he heard it. The drip drop. The trickle. The babbling. A stream. Water. Close. So close.

He hoisted himself up with help from a nearby tree trunk, wincing when his muscles begged him to let them collapse. Not yet. Soon.

Soon he would be home. Though he didn't have one. But home was with Octavia. And Raven. And Clarke.

Clarke.

He was going to tell her that he kept his promise. That he found a way back. To her. To home. And he didn't do it alone.


End file.
